Had it really been four years now since he left home? Despite the stinging-cold wind, it was the only thing on Ace's mind. Four years since then. He was almost seventeen. He'd thrown what he had into the back of his car and drove north for two days until he hit the border, then turned around, drove for an hour, and decided to live in some backwoods town for the rest of his natural life.

His plans for the future? Work until he was six feet under. Maybe help his little sister out of his childhood home before the whole dying part. At least, that was the plan if he ever saw her again; his life seemed to be on a dangerous crash course to certain doom, and he didn't have high hopes for his sister, no matter how grim it seemed. He hoped he would see her again, of course, but he wasn't optimistic. He didn't want to think about any alternatives to his predisposed plan, either.

The "e" of "Ace" on the name placard outside his front door was gathering rust, and he knew it would be a few weeks before he got around to doing anything about it. Bringing the collar of his coat closer to his face, Ace shut the apartment door as quietly as he could manage, locking the front door with a familiar click. He kept the keys still looped in his bare fingers.

The apartment building was quiet. It wasn't a part of its own complex, only its own free-standing building owned by a gal living at its heart on the first floor. Though there was no sign to indicate it, everyone called it "Grey Castle", including the landlady herself. And truly, there was no denying how grey it was; the entire building was adorned in iron ornamentations and dark grey brick. It was certainly no castle, but Charlotte kept it in a working, acceptable order.

Miss Charlotte was really quite the lady: baby-faced, with shoulder-length red hair she kept straighter than a line and a beauty mark under the outer corner of her left eye. She was beautiful, selfless, headstrong, and brandished the tenacity of a killer. Despite her insistence, he would never call her just Charlotte, even if it killed him; he held her in too high regard to address her any other way. Though she never expressed the expectation of payment, in fact begging him not to pay her in any way for his one-bedroom unit, he felt deeply indebted to her. He didn't particularly blame himself for those feelings.

As payment for all the trouble she put herself through for him, Ace was always on his best behavior, minding himself whenever she was around. Admittedly, she could become belligerent in a matter of seconds, while Ace would keep quiet. On his own time, Ace would engage in more sneaky behavior, knowing it was best for Miss Charlotte not to know about his private affairs.

He descended the stone stairs from the second floor on the balls of his feet, cringing whenever anything so much as creaked. He felt sometimes like he was trying to sneak out of the house past his parents for a quick smoke break like when he lived at home. It was easy to forget that the woman downstairs wasn't his mom and probably couldn't hear a single noise from him anyway.

In the parking lot, snow had gathered up around the pavement and evergreens. The black-iron security gate was open like usual, its treads caked with powdered snow. It seemed no one had come or gone either on foot or by car since Ace had returned home for the night.

It was really no surprise the place was so dead when the building was only made up of twenty-five apartments. At least it was a cozy place to live: never too loud, always too quiet.

Mindful of the patches of ice, Ace made his way to the tiny park just a few yards west of the building. It was serene, especially at night surrounded by American pine forests. He passed through there constantly throughout the week, whether to smoke or relieve himself of boredom during his late, sleepless nights.

Beneath the streetlamps, the small park was cast in a blue glow. The moon through the trees stayed always aglow, lighting up the wide, cobbled paths still packed with untouched blankets of snow. Just a few miles away, the base of a small mountain range dotted with trees obscured the horizon, a popular spot to fish and hike. Some parts of the forest were too dangerous and therefore unreachable, littered with narrow caves and a few infamous sinkholes. It was a minefield of a place, but its beauty could still be appreciated from a distance.

Out of his coat pocket, Ace fished for his cigarettes and one of the many lighters he kept on-hand. He emptied a cigarette out of his mostly-empty pack into his numb, free hand. He swapped the pack for a lighter and cupped the dying flame, struggling to keep it alive against the freezing wind. Nearby bushes and tree branches rustled as the wind poured over the cascading mountains just a few miles off.

Among the natural nightly sounds and thick cigarette smoke, a murmur reached Ace's ears from yards away. Calmed by nicotine and fatigue but freezing up in the face of impending danger, Ace tensed up, alerted by the sudden change in atmosphere.

As the wind stilled, he could hear something bizarre, wild and low. The faint sounds were louder than before, and panic set into him, adrenaline freely flowing. One by one, brush and twigs rustled and snapped, alerting him of something foreign shuffling closer.

Ace stood frozen in place. He wanted to run, but a primal instinct insisted he stood there unmoving, staring into the darkness of the woods from a distance. From atop a cluster of bushes, a nest of white hair peeked out. It was tangled, matted, and kinky, jammed in a nest of leaves and brush, but Ace couldn't tell if it was human or animal no matter how long he stared. At that point, he wasn't sure if it mattered; if the perceived danger he felt was real, he was screwed either way.

A small hand came to rest on the frozen soil beneath the bushes, the pale skin around its fingers having turned a deep purple. He could see how dirty this newly-discovered person's nails were from a distance even before they began to dig their fingers into the frozen dirt, anchoring them into the ground. The wind and branches fell too quiet for comfort. While the surrounding greenery stilled, the person beyond the bush emitted a small groan.

It was a feminine noise, and just knowing it was a person who happened to be female was enough to change his perspective on the situation entirely; he no longer felt like he was being hunted. This wasn't some dangerous pursuer, this was someone being pursued by something else.

Stepping forward against his better judgement, he kept his body language open, hunching over somewhat to meet the face of a girl hiding beneath the brush. He met red, lidded eyes between the leaves, dull and lifeless. They were doll-like, beady, and somehow as tired as his.

Where did she come from? His mind raced for answers with no context, trying desperately to conclude what he was looking at and if it would suddenly spring to life and attack him.

A delicate, dirt-caked hand reached towards him suddenly, and Ace jumped back, almost validating his fears. Before she could touch him, she stopped, waiting for him to take her hand.

Getting a better look past the branches, he realized she had been dressed in a hospital gown, and it had been so violently torn in so many places that she may as well have been wearing nothing at all. Ace would have thought she'd never been outside in her life judging by her complexion alone.

Her mouth was ajar, lips chapped and bleeding. Despite how the shrubs obscured the light and played shadows across her face, he could see the damage on her skin well. She said nothing to him as she laid there on her stomach, hand trembling and waiting for something to take hold.

Overlooking the dirt entirely, he took her hand, too tired to make a better judgement on her wellness or his actions. He batted away the bush branches, and it was the girl's turn to flinch away from him swatting at the foliage. Perhaps he should have known better, but this whole situation seemed so strange to him that the danger he might have been in and her potential anxiety had become the least of his worries.

She collapsed into a mound of snow beneath the bush. Ace recoiled again.

The side of her head and a good part of her hair were caked with blood, something he had managed to miss before as it stayed out of his sight. With her face in the snow, he couldn't see where a wound large enough might have been, only that it existed and stained the fresh snow around her head.

He looked around frantically before scooping the girl up into his arms. She was small and lifeless, and through his thick winter clothing, he could feel each individual bone press against his chest. Blood oozed from multiple scratches on her arms and legs and dripped onto his clothes, creating stains he was sure would never come out.

It was completely, unquestionably gross, but the absurdity of the moment alone and the dire nature of the situation left him too stunned to even think about something so comparably insignificant. He'd never seen this girl in his life. She was cold to the touch. He could have been holding a corpse at this point, judging by the magnitude of her injuries, and the stress was mounting.

Realizing the danger, Ace turned on his heels and started to run, boots crunching against the snow. He couldn't think. He was cold and confused and speechless beyond belief, trying more than anything not to slip while he rationalized his scattered thoughts. Where was he supposed to go from here? What was he supposed to do with the body if this girl was dead? Why was he even doing this?!

He only had Miss Charlotte's apartment on his mind as he returned to the building's courtyard, breathing hard against the wind. No one could have possibly been awake or even noticed him, but he remained reasonably paranoid of the idea of anyone spotting him as he carried the bloodied stranger in his arms. He was a bigger guy, built. If someone didn't know any better, he could have done this himself. Everything about what he was doing seemed suspicious at best, criminal at worst.

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Frantically, he banged against Charlotte's door with his foot. Light streamed into the alley as a lively, perturbed Charlotte answered the door, completely unsure of why she was receiving such noisy company so late in the evening.

"Ace, wh—" Her confusion quickly melted into fear as she assessed the pair. "Holy... Ace!" She looked over him for bystanders before beckoning him in hurriedly, eyes wide with panic. "What are you doing?! Who is she?!" She slammed the door behind him, gesturing him in.

Ace ran past her wordlessly, setting the girl down gently on Charlotte's burgundy love-seat. A couple bloodstains probably wouldn't hurt this thing too much, he thought.

"Dammit, Ace, answer me!" She cried, tugging at the back of his shirt in a blind fervor.

"Miss Charlotte, I really don't know—"

"What do you mean 'you don't know'?!" She wailed, pushing him to the side as if to reach out to the girl before immediately changing her mind and shuffling away towards the kitchen. "Where is my—" Her head snapped up. "Did you do this, Ace?!"

He recoiled. "What?! No! I—"

"I swear to God, if this is some kind of joke...!" Charlotte presented a pink box from one of her kitchen cabinets, closing the cabinet with the bump of her hip. The girl on the couch was out cold, bleeding out onto the cushions. Charlotte fumbled with the box as she grew closer.

"I just found her like this while I was walking!" Ace assured her, still watching the girl in shock. Although a generous amount of dried blood had glued half of her hair to her cheek, the rest of her curly had fallen away from her face, flecked with deep reds. Leaves and twigs had tangled themselves in multiple sections of her unruly white hair.

The girl came to suddenly as Charlotte pressed an antiseptic-drenched piece of gauze to an injured section of her arm, causing her to eyes to snap open. She cried out in pain with an agonized groan, violently startling both parties in the room. Charlotte hushed her with a small apology, using a dry piece of gauze to wipe the residue away before going back over it. "I'm not going to ask about the clothes, since I'm assuming you don't know either," she commented, momentarily glancing at Ace. "She's not going to die from any of this, I hope, but..."

Tears had welled up in the girl's eyes, but nothing indicated that she knew what was going on. If anything, it was only the pain that was causing her to react with such distress, and Ace was partially confident that was the case.

"Do you need me to bring her into the bathroom?" Ace asked, moving to pick the girl up.

Charlotte only nodded, turning and shutting the first aid kit to move throughout the apartment. She followed closely behind, and the girl continued to groan, utterly exhausted by the overstimulation and pressure on her wounds. Ace managed to shimmy her into the bathtub, where her scrapes stained the edges of the bleached porcelain. Taking quick note of the mess, he assessed the state of his own clothing, glancing down.

"Run cold water, Ace," Charlotte advised him, sitting at the edge of the tub. She propped her kit up on the toilet seat next to her, pressing the back of her hand to an unbloodied part of the girl's skin. "She's freezing."

Tearing his focus away from himself, he followed her orders, testing the temperature with his hand before dropping the plug into the drain. Charlotte reached over the edge of the tub towards the girl, tugging the remains of her clothes off her torso. Tossing them into a corner of the bathroom, she took no time to reach for a bottle of peroxide at hand, pouring it into the cold bathwater. The girl protested, resting her head against the wall along the tub.

"I wish I knew what I was doing," Charlotte confessed, scoffing uncomfortably. She turned to Ace, who could only watch from the side. "Do you have any idea how this happened?"

"No," he admitted.

Nodding solemnly, Charlotte returned to her work, tugging on a pair of latex gloves. The smell of blood had all but filled the air. The girl's outbursts had stopped for the most part, but her cheeks were streaked with tears.

"Ace, go into the kitchen and warm up a glass of milk," Charlotte advised. "Just pour some into a mug and throw it in the microwave for a few seconds... I don't care how you do it."

Ace darted out into the living room, running past the now-stained couch into the kitchenette.

From out in the kitchen, he could hear Charlotte cooing reassuring words to the girl he'd brought in. Somehow, it was comforting to know how maternal she was, even when he was out of the room. Ace set the mug in the microwave, sending it around for a few seconds. He pulled it from the microwave, assuming it was good enough, and escaped into the bathroom.

"... you're doing good, just stay awake for me..." Charlotte murmured, still patting the girl's cheek as Ace returned with the mug, offering it to Charlotte. She thanked him in passing as she tested the temperature of the drink through her glove and placed the rim of the mug at the injured girl's lips, tipping back the mug for her.

Her eyelids were heavy, but she managed to take a few sips, although some of the drink escaped from the corners of her mouth.

"Warm up the bath water." He did as Charlotte asked, draining some of the cold water out of the tub. The bathwater had turned a bright pink after just a couple minutes. He took it upon himself to replace the peroxide. He could see the appreciation on Charlotte's face, but her expression quickly turned sour.

"We're getting there." Charlotte looked up at him. "Tell me what happened," She asked Ace, looking up at him from the ground.

He stared at the girl's skin, so pale it made him nauseous. The blue tint in her fingertips had begun to dissipate, but not significantly. "It's not that exciting, really; I went out to smoke and this girl was in the bushes," Ace explained. "I happened to hear a noise from the bushes, and when I went to check what it was... she was there." He pulled a washcloth down from Charlotte's towel rack and ran it under the faucet; by then, the pink color of the bathwater had grown more vibrant. It was hard to ignore how filthy it looked. "So, I just... picked her up and brought her here-- should we drain this?"

"Yeah," she agreed, releasing the drain plug. Warm water had finally reached the pipes. Ace pressed the washcloth to a gash in the girl's shoulder. At the pressure, the girl cried out in pain, so sudden and piercing that both Ace and Charlotte flinched. Charlotte reached for the girl's uninjured shoulder after the initial shock she received, trying to soothe her with a few strokes of her hand along her bare skin. "Oh, honey..."

"Help," the girl groaned, the volume of her voice escaping her after her initial cries. Her voice was small, dry, and distant, but Ace figured it was a good sign she could speak in the first place. There was no indication that she was cognizant anymore, especially when the final shreds of consciousness were being swept behind her eyelids. Her eyes were watering. Ace reached for her hand, limp by her side, and squeezed it.

Tears quickly dripped from the corners of the girl's eyes. Charlotte's voice was straining, finally starting to sound desperate: "What's your name, sweetheart?"

The girl whimpered, "Please..."

"Hey, honey, I need to know your name..." Charlotte watched her eyes closely; her shows of concern were plain as day, even as she blocked the drain back up while she spoke. "I need you to stay awake for me—"

"I don't know..." The pain overwhelmed her, and she sounded desperate for assurance that Charlotte would understand her. "I don't know..."

Her head lulled, and Ace reached closer to hold her cheek. Her head leaned into his hand. The residue of tears on her cheeks were still warm, but her dewy skin remained cold. He could feel each individual drip as it hit his palm. Every muscle in her body relaxed and gave way all at once.

"Shit-- check her pulse," a frantic Charlotte hissed, springing to life. Pouring a generous amount of peroxide into the tub, she stood and ran out the door.

"It's really slow...!" He called into the hallway, panicked. To think she had seemed so confident about what she was doing... He could hear Charlotte's footsteps in the carpeted living room, panicked and erratic. A door across the apartment slammed open.

"Start drying her off! Drain the tub!" Her voice was far when she called to him, but Ace could make out every word. In one huge, swift movement, he yanked out the plug and cut off the tap.

He was sweating like mad as he yanked down Charlotte's only two towels from the towel rack above him, throwing one over the girl's head. Her hair was thick and still badly matted; he wasn't sure how long it would take to untangle and dry her hair, only that it would be an involved and time-consuming effort for sure. He pulled the still-dry towel across her shoulders.

"Keep an eye on her pulse for me!"

Ace reached for her neck, the first place he could think to check in his dash to get her out of the water. "Still there," he called back, draping the second towel along the girl's torso. He patted her skin down dry, noticing how the light returned to the girl's eyes when she blinked back to life, if only for a moment.

"Bring her into my room! I'm turning the heater up as high as I can," she informed him; her voice traveled through the apartment from beyond the bathroom door.

Reaching around her back, Ace pulled her up, trying to hoist both her body and his own from his knees. It wasn't much work for him, just a hassle trying to keep her from knocking into anything along the edge of the tub and causing her more pain than she was already dealing with. He wasn't sure he could deal with reopening any wounds or hearing her scream again.

His full understanding of how small she was was realized once he had her in his arms a second time, damp hair pressed against his skin. It made him more nervous; she wasn't malnourished, but her frame was... almost childlike... and grotesquely thin.

He rounded the corner with the girl in his arms, swaddled in towels. Her bare legs dangled over his arm. She was awake now, but strangely silent. Her eyes were still wet with tears; from what, he wasn't sure.

"I'm going to worry about getting her warm first before I look her over completely for scrapes and fractures or whatever else she might have," Charlotte informed him as she entered the dark bedroom, wielding another steaming glass of milk in her right hand and her (now-closed) first-aid kit in the other. She set the hot drink down on a conveniently-placed coaster on her nightstand.

Ace turned back to the girl for a moment; she was blinking, but her gaze was different. He was silent, unsure if speaking to her or bothering her with questions would make the precarious situation worse than it already was. Luckily, he didn't have to think for long; Charlotte took care of that for him.

"Sweetie, can you tell us your name, please?" Charlotte asked as she approached her desk, pulling her chair out and away to sit at the side of the bed.

Suddenly self-aware of his height and build, Ace attempted to make himself smaller by sitting on the edge of the bed, joining Charlotte in another attempt to relax.

"I don't know," she repeated once more. It sounded more genuine than her previous dismissals, and the power behind her voice shook Ace up.

"You don't know..." She raked over the answer in her brain for a moment. "What do you know? Where are you from?"

The girl was silent. She made no indication that she planned on answering, only that she was living in her own mind for as long as she could manage to ignore the people around her and suppress the pain. Her brows furrowed as she narrowed her vision, but her neutral expression returned after a few seconds once she grew tired of thinking.

She really didn't know. Within a few seconds, it became clear to everyone.

"Ace," Charlotte said, finally breaking the silence in a hushed voice, "it's one in the morning, so here's what I think." She stood to approach the side of the bed and began piling the blankets she'd prepared on top of the girl, removing the soiled towels. "We'll give her an hour or two to warm back up before I get her dressed in some of my old clothes. After that, we'll carry her up to your apartment, and... we'll... go from there..."

"Okay," Ace agreed, confident he had no reason to doubt her judgement.